QGIS Planet

Installing QGIS on Ubuntu with apt

Installing the most widely used open-source GIS software on the most popular Linux distribution should be straightforward, yet it often raises questions and even problems. This guide walks you through the process so you can refer back to it whenever needed.
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Building QGIS on Windows 10 with Qt Creator

Just a few additional notes about how to build latest QGIS 3 master on Win 10 64 bits, the base document is: INSTALL

The environent configuration of the kit is:

<code>PATH=C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Common7\IDE\CommonExtensions\Microsoft\TestWindow;C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\14.0\bin\amd64;C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\VC\BIN\amd64;C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319;C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\VC\VCPackages;C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Common7\IDE;C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Common7\Tools;C:\Program Files (x86)\HTML Help Workshop;C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Team Tools\Performance Tools\x64;C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Team Tools\Performance Tools;C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\8.1\bin\x64;C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\8.1\bin\x86;C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v10.0A\bin\NETFX 4.6.1 Tools\x64\;C:\OSGEO4~1\apps\qt5\bin;C:\OSGEO4~1\apps\Python37;C:\OSGEO4~1\apps\Python37\Scripts;C:\OSGEO4~1\bin;C:\WINDOWS\system32;C:\WINDOWS;C:\WINDOWS\system32\WBem;C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\VC\bin;C:\Program Files\CMake\bin;c:\cygwin64\bin;C:\OSGeo4W64\apps\Python37\Scripts
PYTHONHOME=C:\OSGEO4~1\apps\Python37
QT_QPA_PLATFORM_PLUGIN_PATH=C:\OSGeo4W64\apps\Qt5\plugins
VCARCH=amd64
VCINSTALLDIR=C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\VC\
VISUALSTUDIOVERSION=14.0
VS110COMNTOOLS=C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\Tools\
VS120COMNTOOLS=C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\Tools\
VS140COMNTOOLS=C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Common7\Tools\
VSINSTALLDIR=C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\
WINDIR=C:\WINDOWS
WINDOWSLIBPATH=C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\8.1\References\CommonConfiguration\Neutral
WINDOWSSDKDIR=C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\8.1\
WINDOWSSDKLIBVERSION=winv6.3\
WINDOWSSDKVERSION=\
WINDOWSSDK_EXECUTABLEPATH_X64=C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v10.0A\bin\NETFX 4.6.1 Tools\x64\
WINDOWSSDK_EXECUTABLEPATH_X86=C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v10.0A\bin\NETFX 4.6.1 Tools\</code>

Note: I’m not really sure if all those variables are necessary, but that worked for me.

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Trajectools 2.4 release

In this new release, you will find new algorithms, default output styles, and other usability improvements, in particular for working with public transport schedules in GTFS format, including:

  • Added GTFS algorithms for extracting stops, fixes #43
  • Added default output styles for GTFS stops and segments c600060
  • Added Trajectory splitting at field value changes 286fdbd
  • Added option to add selected fields to output trajectories layer, fixes #53
  • Improved UI of the split by observation gap algorithm, fixes #36

Note: To use this new version of Trajectools, please upgrade your installation of MovingPandas to >= 0.21.2, e.g. using

import pip; pip.main(['install', '--upgrade', 'movingpandas'])

or

conda install movingpandas==0.21.2

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(Fr) Audit QGIS / EPTB Eaux &#038; Vilaine

Sorry, this entry is only available in French.

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(Fr) Alpes Open Source Software 2025

Sorry, this entry is only available in French.

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Some news about QChat, the chat within QGIS

Some news about QChat and the features provided by the new 1.1 version. #GISChat #GISTribe
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Track the Vendée Globe race with Python and QGIS

Create and visualize GIS data on the progress of the Vendée Globe 2024 race from official spreadsheets.
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GeoParquet in QGIS – smaller & faster files for the win!

tldr; Tired of working with large CSV files? Give GeoParquet a try!

“Parquet is a powerful column-oriented data format, built from the ground up to as a modern alternative to CSV files.” https://geoparquet.org/

(Geo)Parquet is both smaller and faster than CSV. Additionally, (Geo)Parquet columns are typed. Text, numeric values, dates, geometries retain their data types. GeoParquet also stores CRS information and support in GIS solutions is growing.

I’ll be giving a quick overview using AIS data in GeoPandas 1.0.1 (with pyarrow) and QGIS 3.38 (with GDAL 3.9.2).

File size

The example AIS dataset for this demo contains ~10 million rows with 22 columns. I’ve converted the original zipped CSV into GeoPackage and GeoParquet using GeoPandas to illustrate the huge difference in file size: ~470 MB for GeoParquet and zipped CSV, 1.6 GB for CSV, and a whopping 2.6 GB for GeoPackage:

Reading performance

Pandas and GeoPandas both support selective reading of files, i.e. we can specify the specific columns to be loaded. This does speed up reading, even from CSV files:

Whole fileSelected columns
CSV27.9 s13.1 s
Geopackage2min 12s 😵20.2 s
GeoParquet7.2 s4.1 s

Indeed, reading the whole GeoPackage is getting quite painful.

Here’s the code I used for timing the read times:

As you can see, these times include the creation of the GeoPandas.GeoDataFrame.

If we don’t need a GeoDataFrame, we can read the files even faster:

Non-spatial DataFrames

GeoParquet files can be read by non-GIS tools, such as Pandas. This makes it easier to collaborate with people who may not be familiar with geospatial data stacks.

And reading plain DataFrames is much faster than creating GeoDataFrames:

But back to GIS …

GeoParquet in QGIS

In QGIS, GeoParquet files can be loaded like any other vector layer, thanks to GDAL:

Loading the GeoParquet and GeoPackage files is pretty quick, especially if we zoom into a small region of interest (even though, unfortunately, it doesn’t seem possible to restrict the columns to further speed up loading). Loading the CSV, however, is pretty painful due to the lack of spatial indexing, which becomes apparent very quickly in the direct comparison:

(You can see how slowly the red CSV points are rendering. I didn’t have the patience to include the whole process in the GIF.)

As far as I can tell, my QGIS 3.38 ‘Grenoble’ does not support writing to or editing of GeoParquet files. So I’m limited to reading GeoParquet for now.

However, seeing how much smaller GeoParquets are compared to GeoPackages (and also faster to write), I hope that we will soon get the option to export to GeoParquet.

For now, I’ll start by converting my large CSV files to GeoParquet using GeoPandas.

More reading

If you’re into GeoJSON and/or PyGeoAPI, check out Joana Simoes’ post: “Navigating GeoParquet: Lessons Learned from the eMOTIONAL Cities Project”

And if you want to see a global dataset example, have a look at Matt Travis’ presentation using Overture data:

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(Fr) [Story] Oslandia x QWC : épisode 1 / 8

Sorry, this entry is only available in French.

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(Fr) [Story] Oslandia x QWC : épisode 6 / 8

Sorry, this entry is only available in French.

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